A new article highlights the critical role of workforce diversity in advancing the One Health approach, a global framework for tackling complex health challenges at the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health. The article emphasizes that true innovation requires not just an interdisciplinary approach, but also a diverse workforce that reflects a range of human differences, including ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, race, and nationality.
Unlocking the Power of Diversity in One Health
The One Health approach has gained significant traction in recent years, as it recognizes that the health of people, animals, and the environment are inextricably linked. However, a new article in The Lancet Planetary Health suggests that the current framework of One Health is missing a critical element: workforce diversity.
According to the article’s authors, Amélie Desvars-Larrive and Fariba Karimi from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH), true innovation in solving public health challenges requires not just an interdisciplinary approach, but also a diverse workforce that reflects a range of human differences. This includes diversity in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, race, and nationality.
“We usually think of diversity in One Health in terms of teams with experts from different knowledge areas,” explains Desvars-Larrive, who leads CSH’s research team on Health Across Species. “But diversity has multiple facets. As we argue here, those differences in terms of social constructs such as ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation, contribute to diverse lived experiences that are important when addressing complex health challenges.”
Diverse Perspectives for Innovative Solutions
“Such global challenges are often complex problems and to solve them, we need a diverse group of people to examine the problem from different angles and bring a variety of perspectives and methods,” says Karimi, who leads CSH’s research team on Algorithmic Fairness.
Karimi, a professor of Social Data Science at Graz University of Technology, explores a wide range of social problems and phenomena through computational social science. Her recent work addresses the emergence of biases and inequality in social networks, as well as the visibility of minorities.
Desvars-Larrive and Karimi argue that diversity fosters creativity, reduces groupthink, and improves the quality of scientific research. “Teams that encompass a diverse mix of genders, sociocultural backgrounds, and perspectives, while fostering inclusiveness, tend to be more productive, more competitive, more innovative, and better equipped to find effective science-based solutions,” they explain.
Notably, the researchers highlight that diversity in teams enhances community participation, particularly when researching minority populations. “CSH fosters interdisciplinary research and communication, which allowed me to chat with Amélie about this topic ultimately leading to this shared understanding and this publication, showing the importance of creating space for diverse views,” adds Karimi.
This research underscores the importance of embracing diversity in the One Health approach, as it can unlock new perspectives and drive innovative solutions to complex global health challenges.
Diverse Workforce: The Key to Advancing One Health
The findings of this article have significant implications for the future of the One Health framework. By explicitly addressing the need for a diverse workforce, the researchers are challenging the status quo and pushing for a more inclusive and representative approach to tackling public health issues.
As Desvars-Larrive and Karimi point out, diverse teams are not only more productive and innovative, but they also have a stronger connection with the communities they serve, particularly when working with minority populations. This is a crucial consideration in the One Health approach, which aims to address health challenges that transcend borders and impact people, animals, and the environment.
By embracing diversity, the One Health community can unlock new perspectives, foster creativity, and ultimately develop more effective and equitable solutions to complex global health challenges. This research serves as a call to action for the scientific community to prioritize workforce diversity as a key component of the One Health framework, paving the way for a more inclusive and impactful approach to safeguarding the health of our planet and its inhabitants.
